If your customer lifecycle marketing strategy feels a little stale, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Many businesses find themselves in the same boat, struggling to develop new ideas to keep customers engaged. One way to spice up your customer lifecycle strategy is to create loyalty programs that customers can access through Apple Wallet and Google Pay.
If you’re not convinced that loyalty programs are that effective, ask customers – 87% of them reported they want brands to implement loyalty programs. In comparison, 57% of consumers say that they would consider doing more business with a company that has a loyalty program.
One of the best platforms to use for loyalty program creation and distribution is PassKit. PassKit is a comprehensive digital pass solution that helps you create, design, distribute, and promote your loyalty programs to customers across the globe. Sign up for a free PassKit account to learn why leading businesses worldwide choose our system for their loyalty programs or continue reading to learn how PassKit helps with customer lifecycle marketing.
As a business owner, you know that customer lifecycle marketing is key to keeping your current customers engaged and generating new leads. But keeping up with trends is essential, so we created this guide to help you innovate your business and improve customer lifecycle marketing strategies. Let’s get right into it.
What is the customer lifecycle?
Customer lifecycle starts when a customer has their first interaction with your brand, and it ends when they stop interacting with your business altogether. The customer lifecycle is crucial because it can help you identify the stage of your customer’s journey and what you can do to move them further down the funnel.
Even research supports this – 80% of future profits come from 20% of existing customers. You should create targeted marketing or sales campaigns that will speak to your customers at different stages of their journey, ensuring that you know the right approach every step of the way.
What is customer lifecycle marketing?
Consumer lifecycle has become an important part of every modern marketing strategy. In today’s competitive digital environment, it’s important to use personalization to stand out.
Incorporating the customer lifecycle in your marketing strategy will let you follow customers through each stage of their journey, from the first time they come in contact with your brand until they stop interacting with you completely.
If you know which stage of the funnel the customer is in, you’ll be able to send personalized and customized offers and incentives to inspire them to become more loyal to your brand.
7 ways how customer lifecycle marketing improves your business
Customer lifecycle marketing improves your business in many different ways. Let’s mention some of them:
- Customer lifecycle marketing can help you keep your customers longer. You’ll nurture your relationship and keep them coming back by providing valuable offers at each journey stage.
- When your customers are happy, they’re more likely to be loyal. Customer lifecycle marketing can help you increase loyalty by ensuring that your customers have a positive experience with your brand at every touchpoint.
- Happy customers mean more conversions and referrals. Customer lifecycle marketing can help you turn one-time buyers into lifelong fans and promoters.
- Customer lifecycle marketing can help you identify the right time to offer additional products and services, boosting your sales and revenue.
- By tracking your customer’s journey, you’ll gain valuable insight into their needs and behavior. This information can help you optimize your marketing strategy for even better results.
- Customer lifecycle marketing will also help your customer support team be more efficient by providing important insights into each customer so your support team can resolve inquiries more quickly.
- Targeted customer lifecycle marketing campaigns will lower your customer acquisition costs.
3 pillars of customer lifecycle marketing
Customer lifecycle marketing is complex because it analyzes all your customers and puts them in a specific stage of their customer journey. Companies use a couple of steps for their customer lifecycle marketing efforts, so let’s learn more about them.
1. Data analysis
Data analysis is the foundation of all customer lifecycle marketing strategies. Without data, you won’t be able to identify the particular stage your customer is at, and you won’t know where or how to improve your marketing efforts. Common data points marketers use to gather information about customer lifecycle are:
- Purchase history
- How often a customer visits your website
- Which web pages they frequently look at
- Which items they have in their carts
- Which discounts they have previously used
- How much time they spend on your site
2. Personalization
Personalization is another important aspect because it helps you create a better connection to your customers and make them feel special. Once you’ve gathered enough data about existing customers, you can use it to personalize the offer and increase conversion rates.
If you notice a customer converts by using a discount code, you can send another one to their inbox in hopes of achieving a repeat purchase. Or suppose you see them lurking around the same product category, but they haven’t converted yet. In that case, you can send targeted ads with products from the said category to spark their interest further and drive more conversions.
3. Automation
Marketing automation has become irreplaceable in every marketing strategy. You can find many dedicated automation tools that can help you optimize your customer lifecycle strategy. Automation works by placing a customer in an appropriate sales funnel stage and choosing the right content to display to motivate customers to purchase or sign up for a service. That saves you a lot of time on manual work, allowing you to focus on other essential business tasks.
4 phases of customer lifecycle marketing
There are typically four customer lifecycle stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty. Let’s explore each of them.
- Awareness is when the customer becomes aware of your business and considers your products or services to solve their problem.
- Consideration is when the customer compares your products or services to those of your competitors and gauges which one is a better fit.
- Purchase is when the customer decides to buy from you.
- Loyalty is when the customer continues to buy from you and becomes an advocate for your business.
How important is the loyalty stage in customer lifecycle marketing?
As a business, it’s essential to understand the different stages of the customer lifecycle. Each stage presents additional opportunities and challenges for marketing and sales.
The loyalty stage is crucial, as it’s when customers are most likely to become brand advocates and make referrals. That comes with numerous benefits, such as:
- Lower marketing costs because customers will promote the brand they’re loyal to
- Increased brand visibility
- Word-of-mouth marketing
- Ability to upsell and cross-sell products and services
- Increased revenue through repeat purchases
- Improved customer retention rate
- Improved customer engagement
- Better customer experience through incentives such as discounts, freebies, merchandise, etc.
- Improved customer lifetime value
How to boost your loyalty campaign with PassKit
Like most business owners, you’re always looking for new and innovative ways to increase customer loyalty. Well, look no further! PassKit is a great way to boost your loyalty campaign and keep your customers coming back for more.
With PassKit, you can create digital passes that your customers can use to redeem discounts or special offers. Plus, it’s easy to use, and you don’t need prior experience. Let’s learn all the benefits of using our platform to manage your loyalty programs and campaigns.
1. Design stunning digital passes
PassKit web application lets you create beautiful digital passes that will attract customers, increase their engagement and improve their relationship with your brand. It helps increase customer lifecycle duration, ensuring that customers remain loyal to your brand longer.
What sets PassKit’s digital pass designer aside from competitors is that it offers various design options, such as digital membership cards, digital loyalty cards, or digital coupons. You don’t need prior design knowledge or experience to create attractive digital passes. It only takes a couple of steps to generate them.
Here’s a detailed instruction manual:
- Visit the PassKit platform and sign up for a free account.
- Name your project and choose what type of card you want to create – a loyalty card, membership card, or coupon card.
- Design your digital passes for Android and Apple users. PassKit complies with the latest Apple Wallet and Google Pay design standards.
- Choose a barcode type that users will be able to scan at your POS.
- Add branding elements such as your logo and hero image.
- Choose a color palette that is consistent with your branding.
- Add basic information for your template.
- Add useful sections.
- Add backfield information.
- Add valuable links such as social media profiles, official websites, etc.
- Save your design.
As you can see, designing digital passes with PassKit is effortless. You can check out our tutorials if you need additional help.
2. Import emails
If you have a mailing list from previous marketing campaigns or newsletters, you can easily import them to PassKit and use them to send out digital loyalty cards to your customers. PassKit is a one-stop shop for everything digital pass-related, and our goal is to simplify the digital pass creation and distribution process for business owners. Here’s how easy it is to email digital loyalty membership cards to your customers:
- Finish designing your digital passes following the instructions we mentioned above
- Go to your dashboard and navigate to the Members section
- Click on Import CSV
- A window will pop up – click on Download CSV template
- Open the CSV file you downloaded
- Copy all emails and member information from your mailing list
- Drag and drop the newly created CSV file into the popup window
- Click on Upload members
- Your customer base will receive a welcome email with a digital pass attached
You can send different marketing emails based on the customer lifecycle stage they’re in to increase the effectiveness of your loyalty programs.
3. Integrate with Apple Wallet and Google Pay
Apple Wallet and Google Pay are the two most popular mobile wallets. PassKit offers seamless integration with both, allowing you to target both Android and iOS users. Our developers will help you integrate your loyalty program with the aforementioned mobile wallets. When the setup is complete, users will be able to load digital passes with a single tap.
Once they receive a welcome email with a loyalty card attached, they can click on it, and the mobile wallet on their phone will grab the card and save it to the system. Anytime users want to use your digital loyalty cards, all they need to do is open their mobile wallets, tap on the card, and scan it.
Check our guide on adding coupons to your Apple Wallet for more information about iOS devices.
4. Use PassKit enrollment link
PassKit will also provide you with unique quick-access enrollment links which you can post on your website, web app, landing pages, social media pages, or virtually anywhere else. The enrollment link system allows customers to sign up for your digital loyalty program in seconds. Before you proceed, make sure that your digital loyalty program is public. Otherwise, users won’t be able to join. Here’s how you can check that:
- Open Settings
- Find the loyalty program
- Locate the Enrollment Settings option
- Toggle the slider and change it to public
Once done, you’ll be able to share the enrollment link with ease and look at your loyalty member numbers growing every day.
5. Create a quick-signup QR code
QR codes are a great, quick, and convenient way to inspire more people to sign up for your loyalty program on the go. Once you set up your account with PassKit and add relevant information about the company, customers, and your loyalty program, you will receive a QR code for PassKit.
You can print and place it in stores, billboards, receipts, or other places for customers to scan. That is a great way to capture more users that haven’t joined the loyalty program but often visit your or your partners’ stores.
6. Send behavior and location-based notifications to customers
Once a customer downloads and imports your digital pass into their mobile wallet, you will be able to send location-based notifications to users. Location-based triggers work by sending messages to users near the store location.
That reminds them about your business and helps them find your offices more efficiently. Once users receive a notification, they can click on it and read it without unlocking their phone.
Another cool PassKit notification feature is behavior-driven or time-sensitive messages. That is a great way to create a more personalized experience for customers. For example, you can send anniversary notifications with a gift, discount code, and a reminder to redeem their loyalty points.
You can send reminders and messages and create different triggers to prompt the system to send out the desired content to customers.
7. Analyze the success of your campaigns
PassKit also has a convenient analytics feature that lets you keep track of how well your loyalty campaigns perform. Our system keeps track of different metrics to help you understand what needs to be improved and what’s already working. Once you access the analytics dashboard, you will see four different charts:
- Top chart – breakdown of the pass status – keeps track of enrolled members, installs to the wallet, uninstalled from the wallet, deleted members.
- Second chart – shows the breakdown of the metrics mentioned above in a graph form where you can check performance by day, month, or year.
- Third chart – installed wallets – shows the total distribution of the digital wallet providers that your customers are using.
- Fourth chart – installed sources – shows the breakdown of the total number of passes installed for each distribution source (the resources you used to deliver a pass to a user – email, SMS, admin console, social media post, etc.).
Sign up for free on PassKit platform to revolutionize your loyalty program by creating irresistible loyalty programs for your customers.
Loyalty campaign examples from famous brands
Loyalty and referral programs are a fantastic way to connect with active customers and turn them into loyal brand advocates. The best way to explain the importance and efficacy of these programs is to analyze examples from major companies that have had fantastic success with their personalized loyalty programs. This section will discuss the most exciting examples you can use as inspiration for your big or small business loyalty program.
Nordstrom
Image source:Nordstrom
Nordstorm’s reward program, The Nordy Club, is an interesting example of traditional loyalty programs that are attractive and effective. Users receive a point for every dollar they spend, and they can collect points through Nordstrom and its sister companies, Nordstrom Rack and HauteLook.
One exciting thing about this loyalty program is rewards. Besides regular discounts and coupons, users can also redeem their points for style workshops, premier access to new releases, or even curbside pickups.
The program has three tiers:
- Member – free clothing alterations, first to shop the clearance rack, lifestyle workshops.
- Influencer – all of the above plus double-point days and priority access to style events.
- Ambassador – all of the above plus access to an in-home stylist and invite-only events.
As you can see, Nordstrom knows its customers well. It offers rewards specific to its niche, which is something to consider if you plan to create your loyalty program.
Barns & Noble
Image Source:Barnes and Noble
What makes the Barnes & Noble loyalty program stand out is that it’s paid. Usually, loyalty programs are free. However, if you know your customer base well enough, like Barnes & Noble, you can experiment to create an offer that will benefit both your brand and customers.
Customers that want to become VIP members have to pay a $25 fee. Perks you’ll receive from joining are:
- Free shipping
- 40% discount on hardcover bestsellers
- Special birthday rewards
- Early access to new collections
- Discounts
It is a great way to maximize a loyalty program value for your company. However, it’s important to note that you need to have a steady customer base interested in your products or services to enforce paid loyalty programs. Paid loyalty programs will only work for established brands who know their value proposition and know that customers are ready to pay to join.
If this loyalty program inspires you, you can use PassKit’s trigger system to deliver birthday gifts and shoutouts to users to make them feel special.
Innovate your customer lifecycle marketing with PassKit
To stay ahead of the curve, marketers need to consider leveraging new technologies to optimize customer experiences.
Using PassKit, you can create beautiful digital passes that work with Apple Wallet and Google Pay, providing a more seamless experience for your customers. PassKit helps you create and enforce loyalty programs to increase profits, customer loyalty, and retention, improve brand recognition, and reward customers for staying faithful to your business. It also helps you increase the lifetime value of your customer because loyalty programs prolong the customer lifecycle, prompting customers to remain devoted and receive attractive rewards.
Ready to get started? Sign up for free today and design a stunning loyalty program that will wow your customers and grow your sales.
Customer lifecycle marketing FAQs
How is the consumer lifecycle used in marketing?
Customer lifecycle marketing is a strategy you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, create a personalized experience for customers, and target your customers more effectively.
This type of marketing is important because it allows companies to track and understand customer behavior and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly. Companies can also use it to optimize the sales funnel and ultimately lead to more sales and customer loyalty by understanding the customer lifecycle.
Why is customer lifecycle management important?
Customer lifecycle management is essential because it lets you know more about your customers and create a more targeted approach that yields more conversions. It will save you a lot of marketing funds in the long run. It helps companies to maximize the potential of existing and future customers by offering a custom-tailored experience that increases profits and improves brand recognition.
